The research process is not easy. There have been times in the past where I spent months working towards a project goal only to not get good data in the end. Since a lot of STEM research can be very niche and discipline-specific, I found that building a good rapport with everyone in your lab is the best resource that can be available to you. This way, you are able to ask the PhD students, postdocs, and other senior researchers in the lab for help when you need it.

Another piece of advice I have for undergraduates looking to do research is to apply to research awards with the university! Many of these awards have a mandatory seminar class attached which I found was useful for being exposed to interdisciplinary fields of research, learning how to write research proposals, and making your own research more accessible to the general public. The seminar classes definitely helped me better understand how to pitch research proposals to a broader audience, which I believe was key to my success in winning some research awards at the national level.

I have learned a lot from the support of CURF and other research awards I have won over the past three years. I was able to work at multiple labs through the support of the FHC and do research in multiple disciplines. I am presenting the work I did last summer in Germany with a Nigerian Dwarf goat model to improve animal welfare at the upcoming FHC Research Symposium. This is what my poster for that symposium summarizing last summer’s work looks like:

I am also graduating this semester, so I had applied to gap year programs to strengthen my application before medical school. I was offered a job at the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke studying the neuropathologies of glioblastomas (malignant brain cancer). However, I held off on accepting that offer because I was a semi-finalist for the Fulbright award and was awaiting finalist decisions. This past Friday, I found out I was nominated a finalist and won the Fulbright research award. I will be accepting that award instead of the NIH job, and will be going to Tubingen, Germany for ten months to study neurodegenerative diseases such as Huntington’s. I will leave for Germany mid-September and finish my work there the following year in June. Afterwards, I plan to backpack a few countries in the area for a few months before coming back home and starting the process to apply to medical school. I am very excited to embark on this international journey beyond Pitt.